1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a structured document display processor used in a display device for displaying a structured document using a style definition, to a method for processing a display of a structured document, and to a program for displaying a structured document.
2. Description of Related Art
Efforts have been made to display structured documents, such as XML (extensible markup language) documents, on a mobile display medium. When displaying a structured document on such a display medium page by page using a conventional method, a formatting processing (layout processing) is required to be carried out on the structured document from the beginning thereof. Thus, in order to display a particular page on the display medium, the formatting processing (layout processing) must be carried out from the beginning of the structured document to determine the contents to be displayed on the particular page. For example, in order to display and print only the last page of a 50-page document, the layout processing should be carried out on all of the pages from the first page to the fiftieth page. The desired page becomes available to print only after the layout processing has been completed on all of these pages.
Layouts of such structured documents are defined using various techniques, and among them is a technique called “style sheet” (specifications of style sheet is available from http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS, which was available as of Sep. 24, 2003).
However, the above-described technique has shortcomings. First, when a user desires to see a page which is located near the end of the document, the layout processing should be executed from the beginning of the structured document to obtain the content of the desired page. As a result, the user may need to wait for the requested page to be displayed on a display medium. Although the above-mentioned style sheet specification teaches how to define style sheets, it does not provide any solution to the problem mentioned above.